First off, if anyone does wander here from The Guardian, please visit my Buddhism site at About.com. Thanks!
Now for the rest o’ y’all: I had an invitation in my inbox this morning to write an essay about the Dalai Lama for the Guardian “comment is free” site, and here it is. Written in a rush this morning. I’m afraid to read it. At least, I wish they hadn’t picked up that awful photo from About.com. If they’d asked, I would have sent them another one. Like maybe somebody else’s.
This has truly been Dalai Lama day, as this morning I also finished another essay about him for About.com, more of a bio. Today is the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the sequence of events that led to the Dalai Lama’s exile from Tibet (see Kundun). Like anything else Tibetan, writing about it requires stringing together at least five prepositional phrases. Oh, well.